I really like Hunch, despite the seemingly endless list of rather nosey questions it asks during sign-up! At Jiva we have quite an interest in the next generation of Q&A sites (both HTH and Specialize IN are very much in this area) and like many web types were interested in what Caterina Fake would do next after leaving Flickr and Yahoo. I particularly like the quote that seems to be following Hunch around; “Yahoo Answers is not the answer”.

Distance Learning Support 2Tor Raises $10M

2Tor is an interesting startup in that it is targeting working with universities and higher education institutions to supply a full suite of integrated features that offer the ability for the universities to offer distance learning without developing the technology themselves . Raising $10million at the moment is pretty impressive and it’ll be interesting to track the take up of this as more and more universities look diversify their income streams.

Chris Anderson: A Radical Vision of the New Economy

Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief at Wired and author of the Long Tail is in Bristol to pimp his new book ‘Free’. Although as it has been remarked by some it is amusing that a talk based on the ‘Free’ model costs £6 :) This should be an interesting talk and certainly a rare occasion to see someone as well regarded in web circles as Anderson in Bristol.

This is just too cool not to post;

http://www.flickr.com/photos/avdleeuw/

Yesterday (June 2nd) Hitwise released some data about the top 100 student websites in the UK – which makes for quite interesting reading. Now I’m as familiar with the phrase “lies, damned lies, and statistics” as the next man but Hitwise have been very open about their methodology and I reckon these numbers are as trustworthy as any and make for a fun glimpse into what students are looking at.

There are few shocks at the top of the charts, all the perennial favourites are well represented; Google, Facebook, the BBC, Wikipedia and Microsoft all appear near the top. Yahoo and Myspace just about hang on in there in the Top 20 and eBay seems high at 14 (I thought my mum was the last user!)

Bebo is down at 34 which kind of blows away some of my preconceptions about Bebo users – are they not even at uni yet? Or do the swap to Facebook at the point?

Sky Sports is a very respectable 18, the first non-Beeb mainstream media showing. Personally I would choose BBC Sport over the Sky Sports site every day but I know from experience with sports (read football) mad friends that Sky is their first port of call.

Pleased to see Google Maps as the top mapping application with students; Streetmap and Mapquest seem to continue to reign in more general lists and the sooner they die off the better in my opinion.

Twitter has a surprisingly high entry at 22 – I have recently started to see a younger demographic entering Twitter but this suggests its staring to really gain momentum; maybe it was a Stephen Fry induced blip though.

There were seven sites in the list that I had never come across before;

- Surf the Channel – appears to be a listing site for various sites that stream TV and movies
- MegaVideo – looks like YouTube with less videos but also less worries about copyright!
- ASOS – some kind of online clothes retailer
- SideReel – a TV show based community, a little like Television Without Pity but with less snark
- SuperNova Tube – same as MegaVideo I think
- Tudou – I’m guessing its a Japanese video site
- Nasza Klasa – which I guess is some kind of Polish social network?

All the banks are well represented as are many newspaper websites, with the Guardian at the top. Whether this is good news for the ‘papers or not is a different question as judging by my times on uni campuses very few newspapers are sold to anyone but the staff so the students are getting used to news for free online.

The only real blog in the top 100 is Perez Hilton but I guess at this point that is more of an entertainment brand and it has long moved past its blogger roots. Blogger.com is on the list but no sign of Wordpress or Typepad.

As for anything study focused on the list? Well obviously Wikipedia and Google itself then Google Booksearch is at 40 and Google Scholar is at 63 along with a couple of dictionary style sites. That is about it.

A fun list and perhaps something that could have fed into the ‘HE in a Web 2.0 World Report‘ a couple of weeks ago.

Wave Art: http://www.flickr.com/photos/philipgibbs/

Like about 90% of geeks on the planet I’ve been pretty caught up in the Google Wave hype this week and even now several days later I can’t really find any reason to not be impressed. Well apart from my obvious distaste for the applause hungry manner in which the demo was presented but I’m pretty sure most people this side of the Atlantic found that as irritating as me and a combination of American and Aussie attitudes was never going to lead to a modest launch.

I’m not going to spend alot of time going into deep detail on what I think about it but I love the way it handles images, the fact that it is open source is great news and the ease with which widgets can be added is amazing. I think Pete might write a more technical response at some point but for now I’ll just point to some of the best blog posts etc I’ve read on the subject over the last couple of days;

Not surprisingly the place to start is at Google itself – now the video is a long one. 1 hour and 20 minutes and I did my share of cringing during it but its well worth watching – shorter videos from Google focusing on individual elements of Wave are starting to emerge so it is worth keeping an eye out for them.

Tim O’Reilly has a typically thoughtful piece on the Radar blog – which is a great summary from someone who has obviously given alot of thought to the issues Wave seeks to resolve.

Nick Gall writes an interesting and short piece – with a huge URL – which focuses on how Wave represents another ‘web paragim shift’ towards a HTML5/XMPP driven web.

Cameron Neylon writes an interesting take on Wave as he comes at it from what he hopes it will mean to his work as a scientist and researcher. Its particularly nice to hear from someone immediately drawing parallels to their own work rather than just being dazzled by the shiny new toy.

Ryan Carson has done a nice write up on Think Vitamin that covers some of the main elements that he thinks will “change your business, career and life” – Ryan is a tad prone to hyperbole especially with the title but its a well written piece and he knows his stuff so well worth a read.

There are obviously hundreds of other blogs and traditional news sources covering Wave and these just represent a fraction of what is out these (Read Write Web in particular have great coverage).

engine by eye d

Another presentation that has been around for a while but I have only just discovered (thanks to Dave Briggs) is Putting the Fun in Functional by Amy Jo Kim which I have found really interesting and useful.

I’m not a gamer in any shape or form, never really liked them, although I did enjoy elements of the Wii and have fond memories of Paperboy from way back when. That said I recognize the human behavior outlined in the ‘Game Mechanics’ of the presentation; 1) Collecting 2) Points and Levels 3) Feedback 4) Exchanges and 5) Customization. In fact I’m pretty guilty of all of them – especially Collecting for my sins (and my bank balances pain).

It has been an interesting experiment going back to look at the features of both Specializein and HTH in light of the concepts here and see how we have done. We do a pretty good job on embedding both the ideas of Points/Levels and Exchanges into the apps. In fact its not hard to argue that those elements are the foundation of what we have built. We are also building in some elements of Feedback as it seems to be defined within this presentation. This isn’t fully developed yet and could certainly do with a little more thought and evolution over time but it is not a bad start. Collecting and Customization have no parallels within either application at the moment nor in the product roadmap. Does this matter I find myself wondering. I’m loathe to add anymore features at the moment and while I can see a way of adding an element of Customization it isn’t really a road I want to travel down so I’m going to assume 3 out of 5 ain’t bad (in fact it is almost as good as Meatloaf!)

[photo is Creative Commons and was my favorite result for 'mechanics' from Compfight.com in case you were wondering]

We aren’t writing, we are speaking in text

Enjoy the presentation;

Flickr CC Attribution Helper Greasemonkey Script
http://cogdogblog.com/2009/05/17/flickr-cc-attribution-helper/

Alan Levine works for the New Media Consortium in the US (publishers of the Horizon Report amongst other interesting stuff). He has built a hugely useful tool for those of us who use the combination of Flickr and Creative Commons to brighten up our blogs but have to fiddle with sorting out the attribution details. Equally useful (for me anyway) is that he has given me a format for my attributions! I wonder if I could make this work for using in my Keynote/Powerpoint presentations?

On Aardvark Research
http://blog.vark.com/?p=74

Here at Jiva we are pretty interested in the work Aardvark are doing and have enjoyed having a play with it since we got our invites. This blog post is a really interesting insight into the process they have been through as far as using different research techniques in the development of their app. I’m not sure we ever think of it in such a formal manner but our research work broadly falls into the same three categories.

On Semantic Web: What it is, and what it will never be
http://mashable.com/2009/05/14/semantic-web/

A post on Mashable from Stan Schroeder that actually has little to do with the wider semantic web but does nicely articulate some of the problems with Wolfram Alpha and why its much vaunted ability for users to ask natural language queries means very little when you can get better results with simple queries in Google.

Jump into the stream
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/17/jump-into-the-stream/

Post from Eric Schonfeld on Techcruch (for what its worth I only really read Schonfeld now on Techcrunch, well apart from when Arrington kicks up some kind of furore!) This post is essentially a justification for the investment and hype around the concept of realtime streams. Its interesting stuff and their does certainly seem to have been a shift towards this concept in recent months. More and more sites seem to resemble a Twitter/Friendfeed/Facebook hybrid and it’ll be interesting to see if this continues.

The latest next big thing is apparently WolframAlpha. First lets get the obvious prejudices out of the way – naming your app after yourself is narcissistic in the extreme but that shouldn’t get in the way of a great service. Also what the hell is a “computational knowledge engine” – I hope the Plain English Campaign get hold of that one.

My main impression from trying WolframAlpha out was that this was along way from a competitor to Google. Certainly in its current form it is more a competitor to Wikipedia or more traditional reference materials. At best it was able to give me results to one in three of my queries and the results it gave were no great (though I did like the format) and Google was able to get me the same, or better, answers in the first couple of results. By all accounts it handle mathematical and scientific queries better (not surprising as it is built on Mathematica) but that is hardly going to appeal to a mainstream audience.

I’m not knocking it out of hand – I’m sure that as its database expands it will become increasingly useful – as the way with these things – but at the moment it feels very much like a specialist tool, the kind of thing you might have access to in a University Research library or the corporate equivalent rather than something like Google.

I certainly think the hype has hindered the launch more than helped it. They certainly achieved wide publicity but I have seen as many negative reviews as positive but hopefully they will cope with the spotlight rather better than Cuil did.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pray/337725635/

Now being a child of the DJ era my definition of white label (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_label) required a bit of tweaking so I’ve been doing a bit of reading and researching and here are a few notes on what I have come up with.

The Wikipedia definition of a whitelabel product is “A white label product or service is a product or service produced by one company (the producer) that other companies (the marketers) rebrand to make it appear as if they made it.”

Now thats fine but not exactly inspiring – the rest of the article gives a few useful examples and draws the comparison to the white label records of my youth but its generally a weak entry.

A recent(ish) post from ReadWriteWeb about Netvibes gave some insight into their whitelabeling strategy (http://business.netvibes.com/premium-universe.php) and how they had shifted focus to that from an initial focus on the early adopter, consumer market;

[Netvibes] CEO Freddy Mini explained that the start page paradigm hasn’t really taken off beyond the early adopter set but remains useful as a driver for sales of the company’s new enterprise and “branded portal” offerings

The company also cut its burn rate (expenses) by 50% during the same period.

Since starting to offer enterprise and branded products, though, Mini says that Netvibes increased its revenue 4X in the last 3 quarters of 2008.

LOVEFiLM is another example of a company embracing whitelabeling alongside its main offering. The UK Netflix clone/competitor has whitelabeled dvd rental websites built on its infrastructure and using its distribution for companies like Tesco, Odeon Cinemas and WH Smith (it alway bought the Amazon DVD rental business in the UK). It used these sites not only to bring in much needed revenue but also to increase brand awareness due to prominent ‘powered by LOVEFiLM’ buttons on all the sites.

A different take on the whitelabel business model is White Label Dating – a business that gives itself over totally to whitelabeling its comprehensive dating site technology while sharing revenue with these ‘partners’ who essentially concentrate on audience building and sales and outsource the technical matters to WLD.

The channel is actually pretty well done, with a clean, ad-free design that feels very different to the normal YouTube experience and it also offers the chance to ‘Apply to YouTube EDU’ which is sure to add even more content from Universities and Colleges.

It was particularly fun to see that the most viewed video on the first couple of days was ‘the Science of the Watchmen‘ from the University of Minnesota – thats the sort of fact that warms the heart of a comic book geek like myself!

This does rather ask the question about how the likes of Academic Earth are going to compete?  Its hard for any video sites to compete with YouTube, especially with the added benefit of results in Google searches.  It also looks like the hard fought relationships that Google have built with many Higher Education Institutions over the last couple of years have come into play here judging by the levels of ‘official’ endorsements coming out of the community.

As an Englishman it is my instinct to support the underdog so I’ll be rooting for Academic Earth and the other smaller start-ups but life certainly just got alot tougher.

Academic Earth (these guys certainly like the grand names!) is a startup coming out of the US that pulls together open courseware from  a number of top universities and displays them according to topic with the option to comment and converse around the videos.

So far so good, however Academic Earth is a business and as such has commercial aims for its site which is pretty firmly against the Creative Commons terms that some (not all) of these videos have been released under and some of the institutions involved are unlikely to sit back and allow their content to be reused in this manner.

This is likely to be an interesting test case as I think alot of people are eyeing the increasingly high quality education audio and video content coming out of universities like MIT, Stanford, the Open University etc and wondering how they can spin a money making opportunity out of this increased open attitude.

It would be a pity if these academics started to retreat into their ivory towers if they felt their content was being misused but it also opens up the possibility of a consortium of universities with strong open access models pooling their resources and building their own web based repository of content with community elements.  That would likely shake this space up quite considerably.

To be fair to the team at Academic Earth they seem fully aware of the tightrope they are walking and are trying to work with the institutions so as not to step on anyones toes while still retaining a business model.  I think it will be quite the achievement if they pull this off!